"Closed sets, open sets, fixed-point mappings?  I was okay at topology at age 12, didn't follow up, probably better at it now.  Hour a day sounds expensive in time but it'd be nice to have an instant employment fallback option.  Clerics?"

"Yes, that sounds like the right kind of math. I can check if you're smart enough to be a wizard, if you want, there's a spell for checking that. For clerics a god picks you. Usually when you pray to them, not necessarily the first time you pray to them but the first time you've - grown up, in some relevant way, or understood something new - sometimes it's just at an apparently random time, though. They get more powerful through time in their god's service and deeds in their god's service and sometimes, again, apparently at random - I'm sure it's nonrandom from a godperspective."

"'Pray'?"

"Uh, you clear your environment of distractions and kneel on the floor and try to - acknowledge that you're in the presence, or could be, of something much bigger than yourself, something that can see much farther, and you think about their priorities and your desire to serve them, and sometimes ask for things, but, like, 'the strength to do Your will' sorts of things, not for things to specifically go your way, since the god knows better about what's best."

"Do people who become clerics ever regret that in retrospective expectation without benefit of hindsight?  Can you easily resign the position and pick another god if it doesn't work out?  Is successfully 'praying' enough evidence of purpose-alignment that it never happens with a god you'd rather not partner with under reflective equilibrium?  I'm wondering if there's any reason I should not just immediately do this with Asmodeus and cut out the middleman, in case that other cleric decided he needed to go cut his toenails first."

" - I think probably you should do it but you might be too Chaotic or something," or insufficiently informed about the things about Asmodeus that you're going to object to, "so I expect it to not work. I have never heard of anyone regretting become a cleric except if they eventually got ex-clericed, which I think can be traumatic. I think if you no longer want to serve the god that'd probably break clerichood, or if you change alignments to be too far from the god that does it, though I haven't heard of anyone breaking clerichood on purpose."

"Yeah, I'm getting the impression that gods are very much the big factions here, and if that's true, I am starting to wonder whether becoming a cleric is an obvious sort of thing to try if you don't want to get noisily moved around by clerics - supposedly on behalf of gods, maybe, but maybe in fact the clerics don't even know logical decision theory and start wars.  How is being ex-clericed traumatic?  Is the part where nobody does that on purpose because it's so traumatic?  Or because nobody forms a successful cleric bond unless they're gonna get along great with the god?"

"I think mostly - people don't form a bond if they won't get along with the god, and also if you're clericed then the church is - yours, it trains you and pays you and gets you help and guidance and is full of people like you, which for lots of people is hard to find, and also you get magic powers which you get in the habit of using for everything from drinking water to temperature tolerance to lighting - magic can make hot weather feel nice, that might be part of why we don't have a ice industry -  and then being de-clericed is being told you aren't worth that, and losing your magic powers, and losing your job, and losing your economically valuable skills? I don't know any ex-clerics, though."

"Can you talk to a god without being a cleric?  Have you ever communicated with Asmodeus?"

"You can. There are a billion people and gods have...maybe a hundred thousand times peoples' attentional capacity but they're also not spending most of it talking to people on Golarion, there are other planets and other things they're doing on their own planes. Also reportedly gods talking to you causes significant pain afterwards, if you're not using a high level cleric spell that prepares you for it. Because your brain is just - doing a bunch of stuff brains don't do on their own and then the resetting afterwards involves the brain sort of flailing wildly. But sometimes gods talk to people who aren't their clerics, if they're paying enough attention to notice and it's important enough."

He doesn't want to be too obvious about the meaning of the next question, so he'd better toss in a distractor first.  "I guess if the gods can talk to non-clerics, that's some evidence against the picture I was building up, where the clerics might be misrepresenting what gods say, and that's why some of this picture doesn't make sense in terms of smarter-than-human beings acting in coherent ways.  The part about clerics ending up fighting wars is still very strange, even if it didn't destroy much that gods care about.  It's much more a behavior I'd expect from flailing nongods under the influence of something like Chaos, if Chaos here is a kind of reified factor that can affect people.  But I may be stupidly missing the extreme basics of the equilibrium of this entire world.  Is it possible for you to - quickly sketch out who the major factions are and what they bargained for in the god-equilibrium that underlies everything?  So far I know about Asmodeus, the Lawful Evil god of people pursuing selfish interests but in an organized way that I'd ordinarily say is icky except that your standard of Chaos is fifteen hundred times more Chaotic than I want to be, Norburger, god of killing-people-for-money, and Abedder."

In fact Keltham has carefully memorized the names Norgorber, Neutral Evil god of crime and assassinations, and Abadar, Lawful Neutral god that Keltham would probably get along with; but he does not wish to show that he has.

"Yeah. So the biggest thing is that there was a very powerful god, Rovagug, who ate planets, and had eaten a bunch of them already when He came to Golarion, and it took an alliance of all of the non-Chaotic gods to stop him from eating Golarion too, and He couldn't be destroyed but they imprisoned Him. People say in the center of the world but I think that's probably a metaphor. But the imprisonment took the cooperation of all of Them, and I think any of Them could let Him loose, so that's sort of the base of the god-agreements, that all of the gods have to continue thinking Golarion ought to go on existing under any particular conditions on Golarion that obtain, or They could just destroy it.

The restrictions on cleric magic are generally understood to be part of a godagreement, for basically the same reason - that if any god who wanted could just put much more of Themself into Golarion then the others would have to do it reciprocally and then there'd be much less space for mortals doing mortal things - and so clerics are restricted to the more positive sum set of the things they could potentially be enabled to do. 

The afterlives are a godagreement. Each plane gets to do its own thing and gets those souls judged by Pharasma, who is True Neutral, to be theirs. Abaddon, Neutral Evil, defected on that, they eat their souls and they were eating some directly from the transit to judgment instead of waiting until they were theirs, so Pharasma changed the rules, and now people damned to Abaddon can choose Hell or the Abyss instead, and also most of the other afterlives volunteered some forces to defend the souls on their way to judgment. 

Asmodeus has agreements with most of the other gods, that protect Hell and the souls in it and advance His goals elsewhere. I know He's a party to lots of things protecting Golarion continuing to exist, and the sorting system for afterlives, and the compromise that cuts Abaddon out, and I think also agreements about intervention among the afterlives with each other, and with worlds other than Golarion. I know that long ago the gods broke into coalitions that disagreed on what we called "free will" - what I think you'd call preference incoherence, the thing about humans where occasionally we don't do what's in our interests - and Asmodeus was opposed to it, and in Hell teaches it out of people. 

Good and Evil are opposed but the Lawful Good and Lawful Evil afterlives don't fight each other directly, which is a godagreement of some kind. The Lawful Good gods are ...Erastil, who does agriculture, Iomedae, who is an ascended human and the god of the fight against Evil, Shizuru, who I think...used to do things on Golarion? but lost interest millennia ago - She's got a residual church in Tian Xia though - and some minor ones probably. I don't think the Lawful Good 'side' has unified priorities, Iomedae's all about defeating Evil but I don't think the other gods care about that very much. Iomedae's the one who's a signatory to the Worldwound treaty. 

Sarenrae's the Neutral Good goddess of redemption, the potential for goodness in everybody, and her afterlife spends most of its resources on arguing at Pharasma's trials that every single person should be sorted as Neutral Good, even if they're quite cheerful about being headed elsewhere, on a principle about how there's Goodness in everyone. She smote an entire city once for defying Her will, and She was instrumental in the Rovagug truce. I don't know much about Her. She's popular in the Kelesh Empire. Shelyn's the Neutral Good God of love and beauty and joy and music, She's in favor of those things I guess? I don't know Her to be in any important agreements either, which doesn't mean She isn't, but they're probably not ones relevant to Golarion or to Asmodeus."

"When you say Asmodeus teaches people to be more coherent, are we talking teaching people to not have kids and kill them, or, like, full-scale Keeper 'let's see how much god-math humans can become and wield' coherence?  Is Iomedae fighting Abaddon eating souls, or also fighting Asmodeus?  What's the entire anti-Worldwound coalition?  Where does Norburger or Abedder fit in?"

"Iomedae fights Abaddon eating souls but also fights Asmodeus - or, they don't fight, but - they're opposed, and their agreements are the agreements of enemies, renegotiated off relative power levels. Because He's also Evil. The anti-Worldwound coalition is Sarenrae, Iomedae, Calistria - who I didn't get to, she's the Chaotic Neutral goddess of revenge - Abadar, and Asmodeus, mainly, I'm sure there are other gods involved but They don't have large forces committed here and They aren't among the advertised churches you have obligations towards under the treaty, though the treaty also imposes obligations towards anyone who is here and fighting the Worldwound, regardless of their god. I have no idea what a full-scale Keeper is but devils - the kind of being that people turn into in Hell - are not just people who don't have kids and kill them, they're much more different than that. I suppose some of them eventually become mostly god-math, because some of them eventually become mostly gods."

"How is revenge Chaotic, what?  Not punishing defections is the kind of defect of instrumental strategy that you could mistake as niceness but is actually stupidity... feel free to ignore that if the answer is gods just not seeing the world the way humans do.  Are there afterlives besides Neutral Evil where people don't turn into mostly god-math given enough time?  What did Calistria, Abadar, and Norburger bargain for in the god-equilibrium?"

"Uh, I agree that not punishing defections is - you'd think nice, actually stupid - but I don't think Calistrians are very interested in only punishing defection as opposed to bad things in full generality and I don't think they care about the punishment being - systematic, calibrated in punitiveness - they're not a legal system - Maybe revenge is the wrong word. Reversals of power relations? I agree revenge could be a perfectly good Lawful Evil domain if approached differently.

In the Abyss people turn into demons. In the Maelstrom - the Chaotic Neutral afterlife - they turn into chaos beasts, which can't interact with causality - the Maelstrom doesn't have any - in Elysium I have no idea. In Nirvana they turn into animals for unclear reasons. The True Neutral afterlife kicks you out into other afterlives as soon as you develop a slant on Law/Chaos or Good/Evil but if you manage to never I think you turn into a very specialized kind of godmath aimed at enabling the sorting. Heaven and Axis I think work mostly like Hell in that eventually you turn into mostly godmath but with, like, different emphasis, Heaven'll strip all the Evil out of you and Axis I think just makes you pure Law with no other desires.

I have no idea what Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber bargained for."

Keltham keeps a neutral face.  It is, in dath ilan, mostly a theoretical study, because the incentives have been set up not to do that, to punish any attempt at doing that.  But he is starting to wonder if possibly the woman in front of him is a theoretical entity that ought to appear in only counterfactual branches of reality:  The overtly biased salesperson, speaking bad judgments of a sort she can potentially be caught out on later, and for which she will not later be able to plausibly present an unbiased line of reasoning leading there after-rewinding-hindsight, for purposes of executing more favorable trades now.  It seems like the sort of thing that could go along with a world in which people end up fighting wars.  It is possible, though by no means certain, that this information is being filtered.

In the Chaotic Neutral afterlife you can't interact with causality, hm?  Maybe it's just a translation error, but.

"Huh.  What do clerics or other faction-members of Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber do in practice?"

"Calistria runs abortion clinics and shelters for women who've made marriage vows and want to run out on them. Often for good reasons, like that their husband sucks. Abadar runs Osirion, which is a country south of Cheliax, and runs banks in other places. Norgorber's followers are - mostly criminal gangs. Orders of assassins, most of them that I've heard of, but overwhelmingly criminals aren't assassins and other kinds are less notorious so I bet it's mostly less notorious kinds of crime.

Did you want me to do the thing that checks if you are smart enough to learn to be a wizard, I bet you are but if you are I can ask them to also get a spellbook for you, while they set up somewhere nice."

"Cost, side effects, is there a reason to bother running it if I can already prove basic theorems in topology?  Also snerk about the Lawful Neutral god running the banking system.  I was about to ask how you did banking in such a way as to not make a profit for yourself or try to benefit anybody else, but then I realized that a crazy ideal bank setting ideal prices would drive all other banks out of business, so of course the Lawful Neutral god runs the banks.  Not sure why you think I'd get along with that god, that is very not the kind of investing I aspire to.  Is there a Lawful Good god of unselfishly wanting people to know more stuff and figure out more stuff?  Obviously I couldn’t be their cleric, but they'd be the god whose thingy benefits most directly when I disseminate knowledge and methods of creating knowledge.  They should potentially be going in with Asmodeus on backing me, if Lawful Good and Lawful Evil ever do mutual projects.  Separate dumb question to ignore, how do Chaotic gods think at all, let alone be smarter than human?  Cognition is built of shards and fragments of higher mathematical structures that we'd consider extremely the word that translates to us as 'lawful', unless the godly concept of Law and Chaos only applies to overt social behaviors."

Is he being too obvious in his strategic objectives as inferable from his tactical maneuvering, despite the distractors he's throwing in?  Not much he can do about that without slowing down, and he's under a time limit.

"Good and Evil do collaborative projects sometimes and this sure sounds like one but I don't actually know of a Lawful Good god with prosperity in their domain? The reason why you'd hear in Cheliax is that Good people are so obsessed with unselfishness that their societies can't even sustain positive-sum things like wealth that run on selfishness and I think the way a paladin would say it is that wealth invites greed and corruption and so on, and societies that are trying too hard at pursuing it lose the selflessness." She is at this point dancing along the line of saying things that are supportive of other churches, which is illegal, but letting him decide he can't work with Cheliax would be catastrophic too. Plausibly she should pretend the spell has run out but it has six minutes more and maybe he could tell. "...I don't know that much about Chaotic gods, they're barred in Cheliax because Asmodeus mostly can't form god agreements with them, I think.....just thinking of things I know about, and I don't know all that much about gods, you can have a very short time horizon or very high discounting so you don't care very much if your values will be different tomorrow because you don't care much about anything that happens tomorrow, and will trade off lots of it for things that happen today, you can probably have the equivalent of that in dimensions other than time, you can prefer that future instances of you share your values but otherwise have entirely different attributes, I think gods have lots of attributes that are not overdetermined by their values, you can - I don't really know. Some kinds of outsiders you can summon and ask this stuff but obviously you can't summon full-on chaos beasts and the things you can summon from the Maelstrom are generally not very easy to get answers out of, is my understanding."

Interesting.  Push on that slightly harder and see what happens?  Maybe his strategy will then be too obvious, but inferring other people's strategies from the infinite possibility space seems like it should actually be hard, or at least, fiction writers talk about how often their readers misinterpret them even when trying to telegraph things.

"Not a god of prosperity, a god of - teaching?  Knowledge?  Aside from everything to do with parents and kids, people who unselfishly want other people to gain knowledge are, like, one of the few examples I can think of Good that doesn't seem fully inhuman.  I'm not one of them, but there are dath ilani teachers who want you to learn their whole subject matter in a way that seems - as unselfish as anything ever gets?  And more importantly, there are people driven towards gaining new knowledge in a way that should code as either Good or Neutral, as I understand it?  If there's a god for that, and people going with that faction are actually competent at the god's thing, I am going to need the best of those people if I try anything on the order of reconstructing a nonmagical sailless ship.  The sort of people who invent math before any wizards have a use for it because they are just that obsessed with math.  Those people.  Is there a god for that one?"

"A god of teaching. I'm pretty sure not. I can ask once the spell runs out and give you a signal yes or no - yes looks like this, no looks like this - my books list all the gods including the minor ones by domain, and there are lots of minor ones, but that I expect I'd have heard of, it's not a rare profession exactly, my mother's a teacher. ....honestly I think lots of people like that are Neutral and worship Nethys, the god of magic and knowledge. Nethys is said to be omniscient, but He's also insane, His plans don't make any sense on the material world and his clerics get steadily less capable of talking about things to humans over time and usually blow themselves up doing ridiculous magic experiments. ...Irori is a Vudrani god - ascended human - of perfect self-knowledge - no, I guess that doesn't seem like the thing either -"

"Sounds like we're running out of time.  Are we running out of time?"

"Yes. Last questions? Planning to get you nice accommodations, spellbook, writing implements, look up gods."

"Sounds correct.  Look, I'm sorry if this is impugning your honesty, but I hope you realize that I'm in a strange place with a visibly low level of Law where people fight destructive-conflicts.  I do not actually know that people here have set up all the careful structures and customs you use to incentivize honest business arrangements.  I am going to be taking some precautions based on that and I am genuinely sorry if those are unnecessary and lead to suboptimal outcomes from your own perspective, but please consider my own ignorance."

"So, you could have reported all that to me completely honestly and I just went picking for coincidences until I found some.  Or it could be not-coincidence that you're willing to tell me the identifying things of all the Good and Neutral gods I can't become a cleric of, but not actually give me Asmodeus's key identifying info, plus there's supposedly no other Lawful Evil gods worth mentioning, plus all the Neutral Evil gods you identified to me are horrible.  I am not actually going to get myself into a situation where other people are playing middleman between myself and Asmodeus, and pawning off cute financial rewards on me, while keeping the intelligence-enhancement rewards to themselves.  Again, sorry if you're not even considering that, but I need to consider what your incentives might be.  I am currently considering options that include praying directly to Asmodeus about this, tonight, based on my guesses as to what the top Lawful Evil god's thing might be, starting with 'making money'.  If that's a terrible idea because, for example, I can accidentally get Iomedae if I accidentally think about how I'm unhappy about the Abaddon business, or because the existing Asmodeus clerics get snippy when somebody tries to talk to Asmodeus without them, maybe explain very fast why I shouldn't do that.  Alternatively, tell me how to make sure I get Asmodeus."